Greats or Favorites? How to Make a List of 100 Top Films

The recent Sight and Sound list of The Critics’ Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time and the Variety list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time got me to think about my own criteria for creating such a list, and the distinctions between “Best films” and “Favorite films.” The problem with the Sight and Sound and Variety lists is that they’re created by committees and are designed to appeal to a variety of different fan bases and constituencies. Choosing 100 gives plenty of room to placate as many different factions as possible, with cultural politics often playing a role and the ranking based on the number of votes the films get. A Great or Best film should be lauded, taught, studied, and viewed repeatedly. But, for me at least, there should be some unifying set of aesthetic principles linking the films and a recognition of their cultural, social and artistic importance within the context of their production and release, making their inclusion on the list obvious. This is hard to do when you’re relying on committee and other input for the choices. I agreed with 16 of Sight and Sound’s choices and 19 of Variety’s. While some of the odder choices, particularly on the Variety list, made me cringe (and I won’t name names), there’s a huge middle ground of films represented that I never felt strongly enough about to include on such a list myself but which I can accept as meeting the various criteria employed by this sampling of critics. And there are numerous non-Asian foreign critical favorites I never bothered to see. I also have much narrower criteria on which to base such a list than the folks involved in the creation of these.